Important If True 54: A 30 Foot High Screaming Billboard

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A 30 Foot High Screaming Billboard
What does the future hold? You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Just imagine... Content creators, the size of skyscrapers, looming over our cities. The greatest actors of the baby boomer generation, locked in undying clone warfare. The world's most precious secrets confined to the pithy slogans of a fortune cookie. Martin Shkreli, still. So, friend, what does the future hold? Let's pretend you never asked.

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Portal 2's "Old Aperture" location encapsulates for me the grody terror of "Double Dare." A kitchen/bathroom tile covered facility with phyiscal challenges, lots of slime, and an antagonizing voice on the PA system, and a live studio audience as the Aperture researchers.

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I have managed to avoid ever seeing a pewdiepie video, and this podcast paints a fascinating picture of who he is and what he does. Are all of his videos just him reacting to events in slow motion? Does he watch stupid stuff happen to people on the streets through unsecured security cameras? The possibilities are endless.

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I have managed to avoid ever seeing a pewdiepie video, and this podcast paints a fascinating picture of who he is and what he does. Are all of his videos just him reacting to events in slow motion? Does he watch stupid stuff happen to people on the streets through unsecured security cameras? The possibilities are endless.

I don't even know, I've never watched him either. I just know he's kind of a professional youtube idiot?

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How is it that you guys independently, in conversations almost a year apart, came to the idea of Terminator Clooney robots? I can't tell if I'm dumb for thinking that you didn't realize this, but you guys never mentioned that this episode gets dangerously close to your previous conversation about robots wearing George Clooney's skin, in order to ..uh..do something, I don't really remember. I think this was around the era when you guys were discussing Arnold Schwarzenegger's arm coming back from the future and becoming one of the forty five brains in order to...uhh...

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There's a roleplaying podcast called Friends at the Table hosted by Austin Walker that's currently doing a sci fi season where it's "anything goes" sci fi bullshit. Austin has outright said before that he borrows ideas from discussions on this show, and I cannot wait for numerous sky scraper sized celebrities to appear on the show.

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There's a roleplaying podcast called Friends at the Table hosted by Austin Walker that's currently doing a sci fi season where it's "anything goes" sci fi bullshit. Austin has outright said before that he borrows ideas from discussions on this show, and I cannot wait for numerous sky scraper sized celebrities to appear on the show.

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As a Gen X member, I'm ashamed to say that Jake totally vocalized what I was thinking about You Can't Do That on Television and slime.

On the slime topic, I avoided all of those products except when I got "The Glooper" on clearance at Kay-Bee Toys. A gun that shoots little snot balls! One more reason I can never criticize any toys of future generations.

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Chris repeatedly calling Jake a "millennial cusper" was interpreted by my brain as "millennial CRISPR". I now envision that millennial DNA has been given to Jake for the purpose of creating a hybrid Gen-Xer/millennial. Millennial-X, or Gen-M maybe.

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Marmite is one of those condiments which is relatively limited in what you can do with it, but I'd never want to be without it. As well as toast, it is also quite good with butter and spaghetti. You can also add a teaspoon of it to add that salty-sweet umami richness to other dishes, a bit like Worcester sauce -- some people like it with bolognese or chilli or onion gravy. You would never want to eat it straight out the jar. That way lies madness.

But the endorsement of soft boiled eggs with Marmite soldiers was nice to hear. It is a favourite breakfast of mine. I used to have this extremely good Mario egg cup when I was a kid and I really wish I still had it.

I was slightly confounded by the mention of the strange device for removing their tops. I've never heard of an egg clacker. It sounds rather indecent. For me there's a tactile pleasure in denting the top of the egg with the back of a teaspoon, followed by tapping a collar around its neckline with the tip; and then you wedge the spoon in the crack and lever the whole thing off, decapitating the poor creature. It's a delightful sensory experience.

A soft-boiled egg accessory I would endorse is the egg cosy. It's a little hat for your egg!

Boiled eggs have a rich and storied history. I think often about the moment in Of Human Bondage where the narrator's uncle, a vicar, allows him to eat the top of his egg if he's been a good boy -- it's a perfect little Dickensian image for stinginess masquerading as generosity. There's a great bit in Gulliver's Travels about a dispute between the 'little-endians' and the 'big-endians': two nations at perpetual war over whether boiled eggs should be cracked at the 'little' or 'big' end. (Interestingly these terms have since been adopted in computer science to describe something to do with the way bytes are arranged that I don't really understand.) The writer M. R. James was said to be able to time the cooking of his soft-boiled egg by the time it took him to finish the crossword in the Times; though how hot he had the water I suppose we will never know.

Sorry for the digression. I could probably write a book about soft boiled eggs. I think it would make me very happy.